Bishop Earl Fernandes sat down with The Catholic Times for a 90-minute interview at his former parish, St. Ignatius of Loyola in Cincinnati, several weeks ago as he was preparing to transition to the Diocese of Columbus.
Bishop Fernandes, an Ohio native, grew up in Toledo, started medical school at the University of Cincinnati before discerning a call to the priesthood, and was ordained for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati in 2002.
His assignments have included Holy Angels Church in Sidney, Ohio; academic dean and instructor at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary of the West in Cincinnati; Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, D.C.; and St. Ignatius. He also has served as a parish administrator and on the Board of Trustees at the Pontifical College Josephinum.
The following are excerpts from that discussion:
Q: What has your life been like since the announcement of your appointment as bishop, and what reaction have you had? Has anything surprised you?
A. The announcement became public a little bit after 6 in the morning on April 2. Probably around 9:30, I left my brother’s house in Dublin to head down to the Chancery offices. And up to that point, between 6 in the morning and 9:30, in addition to taking about four or five phone calls, I answered 130 text messages and 40 emails.
As soon as the press conference was over, I had another 60 emails and 150 text messages. And so I spent a lot of time that day doing nothing but answering emails and text messages.
Then coming back to the parish that weekend, my people here at St. Ignatius are very happy for the Diocese of Columbus, very happy for me. I would say that I was probably more shocked than they were. They were saying, “Oh, Father, we all knew this was going to happen someday. We just didn’t want it to be so soon.” And then there were a lot of tears being shed. That’s just a sign of, not necessarily my greatness, but people’s love for their priest.
Q: Were most of the texts and emails from family and friends?
A: Some, but also I have family in India, and I have a cousin in Tampa and three cousins in Canada. Everybody else is over there. And three of my four brothers went to medical school at Ohio State (University) so there are a lot of people in the Columbus area I knew. I was also very good friends with Msgr. Frank Lane, a priest of Columbus but retired living here in Cincinnati. And so through him, I’ve met a number of laypeople in Columbus, and a number of priests of Columbus, all of whom were ecstatic.
Maybe it’s just the joy of knowing we’re going to have a shepherd, and there’s a lot of decisions eventually that’ll need to be made in Columbus. I think people are happy that the period from Bishop (Robert) Brennan’s appointment to Brooklyn and then his departure from Columbus until now was not actually going to be that long.
Q: Is it easier for you knowing a little bit about Columbus?
A: My brothers know Columbus very well, but I know Toledo well. I know Cincinnati well. I have friends in Steubenville. I know those places better than I know Columbus. Columbus, of course, has experienced tremendous growth and will continue to grow. I have about 35 former students who I taught when they were in high school and have moved to the Columbus area, and now they’re married. They have children. Some of the weddings I have in the Columbus area, St. Mary’s in German Village or St. Leo’s or St. Patrick’s, and even at the cathedral. So in that sense, there’ll be kind of a base of support that does help. It won’t be completely strange, but I’m going to have a great learning curve. I’ll be eager to get out to the parishes and meet the people and meet the priests of Columbus on a wider scale.
Q: What’s your overall sense of Catholicism in the Diocese of Columbus?
A: I would say it’s very different from Cincinnati in this sense. Cincinnati is a very old diocese, which had a lot of religious orders and a lot of Catholic schools. And so at one point, the city of Cincinnati was maybe 40% Catholic. Especially here on the west side, people will ask, “Where are you from?” They’ll say St. Teresa, St. William, St. Lawrence. They identify their neighborhood with the parish church. I’m not sure that that’s the case in Columbus.
Cincinnati has a rural area, and the archdiocese includes the cities of Dayton, Springfield and Cincinnati, but Columbus had a much smaller Catholic population. The presence of male and female religious is much lower. Catholicism has really grown in part because the population of Columbus has grown, so the geographic distances in Columbus are a little bit different, and the size of the parishes are a little bit different.
I am familiar with Columbus a little bit through the Josephinum. I’ve been on the board now for almost two years. Most of my experience of Columbus has been when my brothers were in medical school. They went to St. Patrick’s, so that’s kind of a kind of a Catholic hub for young adults. But then also they knew Msgr. Frank Lane. They would go to St. Andrew in Upper Arlington.
I’m part of the Communion and Liberation movement here in Cincinnati. We have a community here at the parish and another one at the University of Cincinnati. I’m happy to know that there’s a small contingent of members of Communion and Liberation here in the Diocese of Columbus. The Dominican Fathers of the Eastern Province, the novitiate is here in Cincinnati. So when the friars are young, they all come through here and for many years I was academic dean (at Mount St. Mary’s of the West Seminary) and had a very good relationship with the Dominicans. I’m happy with their presence in the Diocese of Columbus, but mostly I need to get to know the diocese.
The Ann Arbor Dominicans, Mary Mother of the Eucharist have arrived relatively recently, and there are probably other religious orders that I will need to get to know. The Dominican Sisters of Buffalo are now moved to Newark. I know the Sisters of the Children of Mary very well.
So they’re up in Newark, and then I’m the regular confessor for the Sisters of the Children of Mary in Cincinnati. And I’m sure there are many others. I know Bishop Brennan brought in the Mercedarians, who I knew a little bit about from Philadelphia, but they’re just getting settled there. So there is a growing movement. The Pallottine Fathers and several of the female religious orders have come in in the last few years.
I think a big difference is probably the presence of schools. You know, practically every parish in the Cincinnati archdiocese has a Catholic school until you get to the northern part of the diocese. In the northern part, they didn’t have so many Catholic schools because there were nuns teaching in the public schools and the towns were entirely Catholic. … You have those five big schools in Columbus, but it’s not as big throughout.
Q: How do you build up Catholic education?
A: Catholic education provided my brothers and me with a strong foundation. We had religion every single day. We also had great parents who also taught us religion at home. So we got the faith, as did many of those classmates of mine with whom I grew up. It’s important to get people in the pipeline, particularly with what’s happening in public education today, with gender ideology with all those sorts of things, to have the Catholic voice being heard – not just one voice amongst others but an authoritative voice so that there can be a fundamental anthropology and the essentials of the faith.
We have a teacher-minister contract for all our Catholic school teachers so that you know the teacher is a spiritual leader within the classroom. At St. Ignatius, for example, we have a thing called the School of Faith where one Friday of the month the teachers don’t teach. They have a day that’s like an in-service day, and they have nothing but faith formation, which I think is essential because any Catholic school ought to be presenting, in my mind, the Catholic faith in its integrity.
And the measure of success is not whether people go on to private school or get into a better high school or college. The measure of success is whether those children are at Sunday Mass and have regular sacramental life and are growing in virtue and holiness. And if we don’t do that, or if we do the opposite, then we have undermined the reason for the existence of Catholic schools and Catholic education.
And so we really want to cultivate this strong sense of Catholic identity in our Catholic schools. Personally, I’m not very interested in private education for the very wealthy that excludes the poor. I want accessibility to Catholic education, education that’s truly Catholic, that’s Catholic first.
Q: Has Ohio’s EdChoice program brought more access to people who cannot afford Catholic education?
A: Here at St. Ignatius, we have 1,160 kids at our elementary school. EdChoice is important when you have failing school districts, but our campus is also an inclusion school, so that students with disabilities, learning disabilities or physical disabilities can come here in part because there’s a lot of Peterson (special needs) scholarship money available.
And then EdChoice makes Catholic education available for a lot of children who live in poor neighborhoods. So those areas where Catholics once lived but moved away to the suburbs, those parishes have parish schools. Those schools are sustained in part by EdChoice, but what we’re seeing in some of those regions is that these aren’t just non-Catholics attending the school. In some regions, for example, there are poor, working class Catholics or Latinos who are moving who don’t necessarily have the tradition of coming to a Catholic school, but now Catholic schools are becoming available, and their presence can help increase the Catholic identity of those schools.
Q: Are those evangelization opportunities?
A: Absolutely. If you have a Catholic school, the purpose of the Catholic school is to further the mission of the Church, and the mission of the Church is evangelization to mediate the presence of Christ in the human reality in society, in the classroom, in the family.
My friend, Father (Mark) Watkins, he’s pastor over at St. Lawrence (in Cincinnati), and what he found was, he had a lot of EdChoice students in his school, many of whom have parents who were Catholic, but the children hadn’t been baptized. And so this was a way of introducing those children to the faith and to the sacramental life of the Church. And so they get into a regular rhythm.
My experience has been many children go to Catholic schools, but they don’t come to Mass, unfortunately, or they come to Mass but they don’t know what’s going on. But my experience with the Catechism of the Good Shepherd program is children interacting with things, learning their Bible stories. They learn how to be silent, they learn how to pray.
The purpose of education is not simply to give them the right answers, but rather it’s to train the mind to think critically and to make judgments. And so to teach them how to ask the right questions, and then to use reason, along with faith, but to use the reason in order to discover the truth and to appropriate it.
We want to say here’s the Catechism, learn these things, but it doesn’t impact people’s lives. We want education to facilitate a personal encounter with Jesus Christ that changes your life. So Pope Benedict XVI, in the very first paragraph of his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, said being a Christian is not a result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea. It’s a result of an encounter with an event or person that opens up new horizons and gives our life a decisive direction.
Well, that’s what Catholic education ought to do – facilitate the encounter with Jesus Christ in and through his Church that gives our life a decisive direction that opens up new horizons and new possibilities about how to live.
When Pope Benedict opened the Year of Faith, 10 years ago now, he talked about different dimensions of faith. Faith is taking a stand with Christ so as to live with Christ. And I think too often we have head knowledge but we don’t have a heart that can see or act, or people react with feelings but without using reason, and we descend into a type of emotivism. Catholicism really sees the compatibility between faith and reason.
Q: One overriding concern from people is: Why did my children, or myself, who have had Catholic education, stray from the faith?
A: People still have a funny idea that there’s still tons of priests and nuns in the Catholic schools teaching religion from the Baltimore Catechism. And that era ended two generations ago. I think there’s also so many parents who rely on the schools to educate their children in the way of faith. But this is why it’s so important to form the formators, to form the teachers in the Catholic faith so that they can present it accurately.
What I find is people my age are parents, and they’re saying, “You know, my children are questioning me, but I don’t know how to explain this stuff to my children.” And when I think about what was actually taught in Catholic schools in our religion classes when I was a child it was, the answer to every question was God is love. Well, I know God is love.
Because we got no content in our religion classes, people our age find it difficult to explain these truths to their children. The textbooks now are much better. But the challenges are different. And so the parents can’t really go through the textbook because, unfortunately, they don’t always have the information themselves or they don’t know how to explain it in a coherent manner. So we have to get back to sometimes the basics, the basic proclamation of the faith.
I think a second thing is the way in which we teach the faith, for the most part, should be from the point of view of assent to these truths. So we have to try to say, OK, how can we present these truths in a way in which the children can understand but in a way with the mind and the heart of the Church rather than from the position of dissent, like question everything. You need some structure, but I’m going to train your mind how to think critically and ask the question. Otherwise, to say question everything, or this is my point of view, that’s different from what the Church actually teaches. It becomes an ideology, and that’s not education.
So I think that’s why parents struggle. And because children have access to so many different things through social media, phones and things like that, which didn’t exist then, so how are we going to get the Catholic message out in a way that is attractive and coherent.
So here, for example, in Cincinnati, the next exit up the road from this parish is Ruah Woods Institute. Ruah Woods was founded to teach (Pope St.) John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. And originally, they put on some retreats and things for teenagers, but they developed the K through 12 religion curriculum, which doesn’t replace religion but supplements the religion curriculum, and they’re selling it to dioceses all over the country.
We’ve had it here at St. Ignatius for more than 10 years, and it’s making a profound difference in how children speak about themselves, they understand some of the basic concepts of the Theology of the Body, that I was made to be a gift to others. I need to give myself to another, that I’m not to be treated as an object but as a person. They understand some basic concept of human dignity. Now, the children come back with this knowledge, but the parents don’t understand. So we need to do much more in the way of adult faith formation.
I want to reiterate that parents are the primary educators and teachers in the way of faith. And so this is also how laypeople live their vocation in the world to take this seriously. I’m a primary educator, not the priest, not the nun. I, as a father, I, as mother, I’m an educator. Am I putting in the same effort in to teach my child of faith as I am to saying that they’re successful soccer or tennis or basketball players? Am I putting the same effort into them learning the faith, nourishing them spiritually, as I am into preparing the family meal?
I think these are some of the things that parents can assume their responsibility, and I want to help parents to assume their responsibility. Let’s put the tools in their hands so they can. I think family-based catechesis is one direction that can help do this.
We have a lot of PSR (Parish School of Religion) students that come in, but next year here in our parish we’re going to start switching so that once a month, parents will come for classes, and then they’ll have a couple of weeks where they’re not going to come in for class but they’ll have to do it at home. It turns things back to the parents to work at religion with their children.
My father was a physician. My mother was a stay-at-home mom of five boys born between 1966 and 1973. But they taught us our religion. I mean, my father would come back tired having worked long, long shifts, and he takes us one by one down in the basement and review s the questions in the Baltimore Catechism with us so that we knew them. And we prayed the family rosary every night.
So I think these are some of the challenges, but the culture, we have to acknowledge, is much less supportive of faith than it was 20 years ago or 40 years ago. And so the rapid secularization, mobility of people the use of new technologies brings with it its own challenges. And so we have to use the new media, I think, in a way to evangelize. But we also have to learn that technology has its place. And we need to also learn to how to put the phone away and shut the TV off and to be still – silence to hear God’s voice and to be able to pray. And I think this is the lost art, the art of being still, the art of silence.
There has to be a deep commitment to prayer and to silence and, and I can’t force that on anyone but I can tell you St. Alphonsus Liguori says he who prays will be saved, and he does not will certainly be condemned. If God is lost, all is lost. But if we lose sight of God, if we lose sight of God made in man’s image and likeness worthy of care and respect, and that’s why we see so much dehumanization today and what the pope laments is the throwaway culture.
Q: Was the example of your parents key in your faith formation?
A: Absolutely. I got a nice card from some people in Toledo. Their oldest son was best friends with my older brother Karl. Their youngest son was best friends with my youngest brother Eustace, and they attributed this (being named bishop) in their words to my saintly parents. And there’s a truth there.
I would be nothing without my parents, what they gave us, and I would see this when my friends would come over to our house, and we’d have to pray the family rosary. Our friend would have to pray right along with us, and they didn’t know the Our Father or the Hail Mary. And so I realized that what we had was very different and very, very special.
The person went on to write, “I remember your mother kissing your hands when you were ordained a priest.” And so this is the type of devotion that my parents had, the reverence they had for priests.
So I had very saintly parents who lived the life. It wasn’t that faith was something extrinsic to their lives, and they had internalized it.
Q: Did you realize that growing up?
A: I realized it growing up. My brothers don’t remember this incident, and maybe because they were in bed, but I remember we went to bed, and I couldn’t get to sleep. Lent in our house was somewhat severe. We prayed the Stations of the Cross every Friday as a family in addition to the rosary. We took our abstinence from meat, but we did it like Wednesdays and Fridays, like the old Ember days as well.
My mother was a great cook, and she would make us shrimp curry and rice and lots of Indian dishes that are vegetarian so it was, and she was a fantastic cook. But I remember once, we boys never ate with our parents. So we boys ate, my father had his cup of tea, then we prayed the family rosary, and then we usually would have a fruit or milk or something and go off to bed.
I remember once I couldn’t sleep, and I came down sort of spying on my parents. My father went over to the refrigerator, and he pulled up two eggs, like hard-boiled eggs, from the refrigerator and put them on the scale. And the larger one he gave to my mother for her supper, and smaller one he took for himself. And that was their way of life. And so these things you realize as a child, and later on it moves you to want to be more like that.
I wish I had my parents’ faith. I wish I was as committed to holiness as they were.
Q: People have said that you seem to have an affinity for hospital ministry and being there when people don’t expect it. How do you do that?
A: My father was a physician. So he had the bedside manner. I myself was in medical school. My brothers are physicians; this is what they do. And so I think probably some of that I caught from them growing up in a big family, growing up in a poor neighborhood. You realize what it is to be human fundamentally. And how to treat people with care and respect.
Like, what does this person need as a priest? How can I mediate the presence of Christ to them. Part of being a priest is being radically available.
So during the pandemic, Mercy West Hospital, which is huge, they weren’t letting those above age 60 do pastoral care. And I was the only priest on this end of town under age 60. So I was going over there sometimes two or three times a day, but the doctors and nurses were familiar with me. I was very respectful of the protocols they put in place. I tried to do what I could when I could.
You answer (calls) in the middle of the night. There’s a snowstorm and ice storm, everything shut down, somebody’s dying. You walk across the field, the roads are shut down, you walk across the field, the ice, to bring them the sacraments, because Jesus laid down his life for his friends, and the least we can do is get cold. And what a difference it makes doing small, little things.
One of our staff members, her mother was dying right around Christmas, and I went to the house and was just there and brought a smile to a woman’s face and brought her the sacraments and the comfort it brings. And it’s not really me. It’s Jesus at work. Sometimes through Him and through His defective instruments, sometimes through the perfect instruments he’s given his Church and the sacraments.
I love going to an assisted living facility. Every Wednesday, my assistant and I go there and have Mass, and they’re faithful people. Sometimes people feel like, “I’m here by myself. Nobody comes to visit me, nobody writes.” And to see their desire for Mass and the sacraments, to see their faith is great. And so the presence of the priest, the presence of Catholic doctors and nurses, the presence of family affirms their dignity.
Q: Is that one of the most joyful things you do as a priest, being there and giving them the last sacraments?
A: I hope they remember me when they get to heaven. You know, I have my sins and my failings, and I hope that they say, “But Lord, remember he did this for me.” I hope.
When I got here, already there had been a tradition of hearing confessions because originally there was a pastor and an assistant and then two retired priests in residence, so they had confession available pretty regularly. When I got here, I decided, let’s share confession every single day after morning Mass. So that’s what we do, and people come.
So making oneself radically available for the sacraments is very important. And if you have it, people will come.
Q: People mentioned that smile you always have and joy for the priesthood. Where does that comes from?
A: First of all, it’s the joy of being loved by Jesus Christ and knowing His love and experiencing His love in spite of all my sins, in spite of my faults and failings. That’s the one certainty I have in this world is that I am loved by God, and that brings joy to my heart.
I also think that in spite of my nothingness, God still called me to the priesthood. He gave me this gift. And that brings joy to me that he loved me enough to give me the gift of the priesthood. But I also say the happiest day of my life was my First Communion day, because I always had a question in my mind. I was a little shorter than some of them. Do you love me as much as the taller kids? Our skin was brown and not white. Do you love me as much as the white kids? We were in a poor neighborhood. Do you love us me as much as the rich kids?
All these questions were going through my child’s mind. And on my First Communion day, that question was answered. And that day I was happy. So when I say Mass, I see upon the altar the One who loved me, and the One who still loves me and who will always love me. And I can look at Him, and He’s a real person there. And He gazes at me, and I gaze on Him, and that brings me joy. At Mass, my brothers sometimes wonder, “What are you smiling at? You look like a dork when you’re smiling.” But that’s OK.
Q: One diocesan priest said one of your first messages for them was about celebrating the Mass with great reverence and having great devotion to the Eucharistic Lord. What drives that message?
A: I learned that from my parents. They came from India right around the time of the Second Vatican Council, but it wasn’t such a radical shift there as what they experienced when they came to the United States. We learned the difference between reverence and irreverence, especially when we misbehaved in church. And so we learned how to be quiet and still and reverent in the presence of God.
And then we were exposed to the Church’s wider tradition in terms of liturgical music and reverence in the way Mass ought to be offered. And so that has affected my whole life. I have a great love for Gregorian chant, for sacred polyphony, all these sorts of things that are part of Church music, but also the need for silence, the mode of reception of Communion.
Q: What led to your vocation? Did it hit you suddenly or was it gradual?
A: Always in the back of my mind I had a sense of the call, even though I never said anything about it, but I was an altar boy. I served Mass. I liked being in church. I liked saying my prayers. It was important to our regular family life and structure.
When I was a junior in college, I studied abroad in England. And I thought, Well, I’m not under my parents’ roof. Now this is probably when I would have started skipping Mass, but I found that in England the thing that was most normal, most regular, was the Mass, most familiar to me.
And there was an Irish priest, Father Ian Kelly, he was a chaplain there, and he was a great preacher. I found myself not only not skipping Mass but going every day. (He said,) “Earl, come in here, you’re looking like a bishop, you’re sitting there looking like a bishop.” “And that’s funny that you say that, Father, because I’d like to talk to you about becoming a priest.”
And so we talked, and it was December of 1992. And we were taking trains on those Eurrail passes all over Europe, but I stopped in Rome around Christmastime. I was with my best friend from high school and went to St. Peter’s Basilica. And for the first time I saw the stained-glass window of the Holy Spirit, and all of a sudden my heart started to beat very quickly, and then I looked over to my right and there was Michelangelo’s Pieta, and we toured around the basilica and went down into the Crypt of the Popes, and I came to the tomb of St. Peter and fell to my knees.
And at that moment, I knew in my heart of hearts, God is calling me to be a priest. But what did I do? I came back to America, I took my MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). I got back together with my old girlfriend. I did anything I could to avoid my vocation, and I moved to Cincinnati. I was going to medical school, and I wasn’t happy.
And then one day I went up for weekday Mass. I went to the Italian church, and I went to Mass, and the priest said a fast Mass, and I hadn’t left an hour for Communion. So after Mass I went to Father and said, “You kind of said a fast Mass; could I receive Communion?” He grudgingly went to the tabernacle, and he said, “God doesn’t wear a wristwatch.” I said, “I know that, Father, but that’s what my parents taught me.”
And I received Communion on the tongue, and he said, “You need to get over that.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “Receiving Communion on the tongue.” I said, “Well, it’s a legitimate option. And this is how my parents taught me, and it was good enough for them and good enough for my grandparents, and so it was good enough for me.”
But one thing led to another, and we got into a series of discussions, but basically he denied the Mass was a sacrifice and non-Catholics and non-Christians should be able to receive Communion and many other things that shook my faith. Probably the only time in my life that my faith was shaken.
And so I said, “Well, I need to go where it’s safe.” I went to the newspaper, and I saw a Traditional Latin Mass authorized by the archbishop of Cincinnati at Sacred Heart Church. I realized it was in walking distance from where I lived, but I didn’t go to the Latin Mass there. Two elderly Italian priests came out and had Mass in English. It was a beautiful church, dimly lit church, and they didn’t preach. They just said Mass, and they looked happy.
And I thought I could be that old and be a priest and be happy. And so I said, “I’m going to talk to that priest.” I talked to the younger of the two, Father Mario. He was 75. And he was celebrating his 50th anniversary as a priest. He came to the United States as a missionary in 1945. We had a number of discussions. And so then I thought, OK, my courage is up. I’m going to call the vocations director.
I called the vocations director in Cincinnati, and I told him my story and said, “I don’t know if I want to be a doctor or a priest or both.” And so he said, “You want to go find out.” And so he raised funds for me to go to a house in Rome called the Casa Balthasar, which was a house of spiritual discernment. So 1996-97 I was there to discern my vocation. … After a year there, I discerned God’s calling me to be a priest. And so I entered the seminary in Cincinnati in 1997, and I was ordained in 2002.
Q: We’re facing a crisis in vocations. How can you help?
A: I was very disappointed to hear that there no priestly ordinations in Columbus this year and only one next year. Archbishop (Dennis) Schnurr (in 2010 when he became Cincinnati’s archbishop) immediately wrote a vocations prayer, and that is prayed in every church at every Mass in our archdiocese. And it really raised people’s awareness of this need.
And then we had to reform our seminary, get better faculty to start teaching what the Church was teaching to create an atmosphere where you could have better liturgy and worship of God, where seminarians weren’t so angry or feeling like they were being persecuted or you have to scrutinize them. But you also have to say these are the fundamental issues that we have to deal with now. And so we did turn the ship around.
For example, my associate pastor at St. Ignatius, he’s coming up on his third anniversary, and he was in a class of nine. It can be done, but it requires commitment. The bishop has to lead and certainly in the area of vocations, and Archbishop Schnurr led.
I think also the presence of young priests in Catholic high schools, in parishes where you have young families that have a happy, joyful attitude can go a long way.
So, Catholic education, Catholic campus ministry, having a joyful, attractive way of presenting the faith can go a long way. We can’t just be the Church of “no.” We have good news to share.
Q: Is the beauty of the liturgy not only attractive for seminarians but also all young people?
A: I think so, and not just the liturgy. The Church has a great musical tradition and artistic tradition.
Q: Have your experiences as a priest prepared you to serve as a bishop?
A: In Sidney, I learned a lot of things. One is that people still had faith. My thought was, part of the problem in the Church today is that people aren’t well catechized. If you just give them better religious instruction, everything will be better. But most people I knew were stubborn, and they’re like a horse. So you just have to break the horse. Right?
But what I encountered in Sidney was people have faith. They have large families. They have their devotional lifestyle. They come for Mass, come for confession, and they’re not horses to be broken. There are people with real faith, and so that was one thing.
So I learned how to treat the people with greater respect and have an appreciation for the faith of the people. And I was called to nurture and to help them to grow in their faith. And they helped me to grow in the priesthood. And I had a good pastor up there who taught me about the need for discipline and have a good work ethic and the need for prayer. And so that really helped me.
It also helped me to teach high school because to teach high school is a lot of work, to prepare your lesson plans, to get up there for 45 minutes to deal with high school kids and questions and all this sort of thing. But I also learned to take them and their questions seriously. Their zest for life, their enthusiasm, their inquisitive minds really helped keep me young.
But you have to be a priest to the young and old alike. And to give them the attention they need and to not just tell them, you’re the future of the Church, you are the Church now. And so I really learned to love my people. I’ve loved rural life. I never lived in the country. I was always worried about that. And I think it’s given me an appreciation for the needs of country people but also parishes and the distances they drive and what they’re willing to commit to. And in the archdiocese, that is vocation-rich territory.
Then I was sent to Rome to study. I was just going to school my whole life, and I was enjoying life in the parish, then you’re in Rome, and I’m like, really? You learn other languages. You have to write the dissertation, all this sort of thing, but you miss parish life, you miss being in the regular kind of sacramental flow, and at the same time it was a grace-filled time because we’re there for the agony and death of John Paul II. So a very powerful and moving spiritual experience.
And then to be in St. Peter’s Square when Benedict XVI came out on the balcony, it was a grace-filled time.
Then I came back to teach in the seminary. Several things became clear. One, I had a weekend assignment, and for 6 1/2 years I said Mass at Guardian Angels Church and then for the last couple of years at Sacred Heart Italian church, and to have that gave me some pastoral experience.
But seminary work is hard work, because you’re thinking about all the other guys who get to be in a parish and things. But it’s some of the most important work in the Church, forming good priests. The whole sexual abuse crisis makes us aware of how important priestly formation is today.
When I got called to the nunciature, I realized I was exhausted because I was doing the work of three men for six to eight years. And I knew I needed to slow down and to rest and to pray and to get my bearings again. And that was good for me. What the nunciature gave me was, first of all, a sense of the Church in the United States, all the dioceses. But being with Archbishop (Christophe) Pierre and the other Vatican diplomats, you learn about the Church in the United States and in the world.
It was much to my surprise when Archbishop Schnurr asked me to come to St. Ignatius, and he had to fight with the papal nuncio to send me back to get me back to the Archdiocese of Cincinnati because this parish itself had experienced, unfortunately, a scandal, and it has the largest Catholic elementary school (in Ohio), and so how do you bring healing to a parish? How do you listen to people, talk to people? How can you be transparent?
Sometimes you can help, bring people to peace and lead them forward. And sometimes people are just going to be mad at you, and you can’t do anything right and some people are going to be angry, and what you’ve done is actually harm to them. You ask for forgiveness for that, and you do penance when you can and you pray and you fast and you say your prayers.
Here in a big parish like this, you learn, I’ve got administrative work to do. How do you cut costs? How do you increase your stewardship and levels of financial giving? You can only do that if you have a degree of credibility. And if you’re transparent with people about what you need, people are generous.
Then the pandemic happened, but you see people are hungering for faith and the sacraments. And yeah, you’ve got to go to the COVID wards, but you go, because I didn’t sign up to stay in an office. I wanted to lay down my life, and Jesus did the same.
And then I learned here also, everything’s under lockout. Well, I’ve got a phone, I’ve got a Facebook account, let’s start doing videos. Let’s start using Flocknotes, and so I did for more than a year every single day. It was Scriptural reflections, reflections on the saint of the day, messages to people, and because I didn’t yet know them but through the social media platform, they began to get to know me.
Little by little, we worked through the pandemic, all the masking and social distancing. And we’re trying to keep the kids in school every day. You’re never going to be able to make everybody happy. And that’s something I learned. But if you persevere, you can begin to see some of the fruits of your work. But you can’t always be in damage control. You also have to cast a vision. So part of what I understood a pastor to do is to enable the lay faithful to be able to identify what their gifts are and not be threatened by those gifts but to utilize them because we’re on the same mission of evangelization.
And people are generous not only with their financial resources, but if you ask them and if you personally invite them, they will respond. And so little by little then here at the parish, I’ve seen things come back to life.
Q: Do you have great devotion to the Mother of God?
A: So my parents thought I was going to be a girl, and so they were going to name me Maria. I’m Earl Kenneth Mario, and so I have this devotion to the Blessed Virgin. We grew up praying the rosary. My parents took us regularly to the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio in the Diocese of Toledo, about 15 miles east of Findlay. I’m sure a lot of people from Columbus have gone, and it fostered our devotion to the Virgin.
When I was a child, I remember on the playground this girl came up to me and said, you know what, “Earl, you’re a gorilla. Your hair is black like a gorilla. Your skin is dark like a gorilla. Your nose is smashed in like a gorilla. You must be a gorilla,” as only a 6- or 7-year-old girl could say. But I took it as a kind of a racial thing, and I just wanted her to know I felt humiliation and rage.
So what did I do? I began chasing her. I chased her all over the playground. And just when I was about to catch her, I ran past her up the handicap ramp into church. And I came into the church, and there was a statue of the Virgin on the wall, and I knelt down and I said one Hail Mary. And I felt her closeness to me and her comfort. And I’ve never forgotten that experience. So she has sort of been with me my whole life. My mother always tells me carry a rosary in your pocket. I grew up knowing that I always felt her maternal presence.
I have a very close connection with the Mother Teresa sisters, the Missionaries of Charity. For all those years I was in Washington, every Sunday morning I went to the house that Mother Teresa had originally opened for HIV positive men, and I said Mass for the sisters, and they are very devoted to Mary, Cause of Our Joy.
So Mary brings us joy, the Holy Spirit brings us joy. Mary brings us Jesus, John the Baptist leaps for joy. And so I’m a joyful priest, and part of that is the Marian presence. She who was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit at the conception of the Savior, was at prayer with the Apostles and the whole Church when the Holy Spirit descended like tongues of fire upon them at Pentecost.
And what the Church needs today is a new Pentecost, and what I hope to bring to the Diocese of Columbus is the fire of the Holy Spirit and joy of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Gospel of her son, Jesus Christ.